


He loves me not

by Bigredtbc



Series: Six-Nine-Two [5]
Category: Captain America, Dark Angel, Hawkeye - Fandom, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: A/B/O, AU, Child Soldiers, CrossHawk - Freeform, Evil!Fury?, Kidnapping, M/M, Maticore, Mpreg, OmegaClint - Freeform, Post CA:TWS, Sickness, Transgenics, X5-692, good!Rumlow, heat - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-07
Updated: 2018-06-01
Packaged: 2019-05-03 16:32:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 21,140
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14573043
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bigredtbc/pseuds/Bigredtbc
Summary: SHIELD is gone, they found Bucky but all is not well with Clint.He'd always wondered if his barcode came with an expiration date, now it looks like his time is up. His science experiment body is playing up. He needs to find answers if he wants to live.At least that was the plan.Clint's sick, not that he can tell anybody. How can he explain that he shouldn't be getting sick in the first place without getting locked up in one of Ross' labs somewhere when word gets out?He only wanted to get information. Stupid Rumlow. Stupid feelings.Really things would probably work out much better if Clint would actually use his words.This isn't a standard A/B/O fic. Tags updated.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is part of my ongoing 692 series where Clint was born an X5.  
> There will be mentions of abuse, child abuse and talk of torture, science experimentation and other unpleasantness.

It was coming closer to that time again, he could feel it in his bones. It hummed under his skin, threatening to pull at the patchwork stitches holding him together. It was a buzz in his muscles that built to an unbearable painful ache that wouldn’t be alleviated unless he scratched that itch deep inside. It happened every few months.

It wasn’t until Natasha had joined the team with him and Phil that he’d realised what exactly was going on. One off hand comment about him eyeing everything with a dick like a starving man eyeing meat and he’d noticed. He usually saw things quicker than that, but maybe he wasn’t lying when he told them all he saw better at a distance.  
See every three months like clockwork he’d start crawling the walls. He’d start getting antsy, eager for a fight, sizing up everyone, then sizing up the males around him. It didn’t matter where he was or what he was doing or even who he was with. At SHIELD there had been no shortage of willing sparring partners, even if it was just Nat. The boundless energy, the need to eat everything in sight and the quick fire temper weren’t an issue; it was what came after that was the problem. The buzzing, humming ache that built into debilitating cramping and some kind of pseudo fever was the problem. It hurt.  
It wasn’t just the pain though, it was his body turning against him. For three or four days every three months, his body subjected him to the worst kind of pain he had ever felt – considering he spent his youth being tortured in the name of training and he’d known his pain threshold at about four years old, that was some serious pain- his fine motor functions refused to cooperate and the little seizure problem caused by his Frankenstein brain flared up.  
Over the years he’d tried everything he could think of to combat it all. It wasn’t until Natasha had pointed it out and Clint saw the pattern that he was able to figure it all out.

Sex helped.

Technically anal sex cured it but any kind of sex would alleviate the cramps and lessen the fever. If he could get a guy in the sack as the humming gave way to abdominal cramps, the pain didn’t arrive and wouldn’t come until the next time the strange cycle started all over again.  
Just having something to stop his freak body betraying him was a god-send. He didn’t question why or how, who knew what the people splicing him together put into his genetic cocktail? He was just happy he had something that worked; that kept his body from betraying him. It was a miracle he worked as well as he did.

At least it used to be clockwork.

After Loki and the battle of New York, after being zapped by Loki’s bargain bin Jedi mind stick, he’d been off kilter. What had been every three months, predictable enough to set your watch by suddenly became highly erratic, it could be one month or six months between with no pattern he could see, and worse than that the symptoms weren’t going away anymore. Which was why he’d been absent when SHIELD went down.  
He’d holed up in one of his safe houses when the itchy buzzing started post a Rumlow booty call, only to find SHIELD in pieces and several helicarriers half immersed in the Potomac when he emerged a week later. That was a day that had to rank right up there with the Battle of New York, Budapest and that one he wasn’t going to even think about.  
That had been two months ago and he could feel it coming around again. Right as they were closing in on the Winter Soldier, formerly known as Bucky Barnes. Really that was just typical. The only kind of luck Clint had these days was bad luck it seemed.

“Are you ok?”

From his spot keeping watch out the ratty motel window, Steve had an ernest look on his face, genuinely concerned about Clint. It was about the only thing that made Clint bite his tongue. Steve was all apple pie and wholesome goodness. Biting his head off was like kicking a puppy or desecrating a national monument or something. Clint stilled in his pacing, ignoring the knowing look Natasha shot his way.

“M’ fine.” He shrugged, easing down on to the paisley couch.

From her perch on the single worn bed, an arsenal spread out around her, Natasha let out a derisive snort. From her it was telling. Natasha’s every move, response and facial expression was always carefully planned, Steve knew that too. The worn floor boards under his feet creaked with the shifting of Steve’s weight.

“M’ fine.” He repeated, glaring at Natasha, feeling his lips thinning.

This time the snort was louder, more disbelieving and she didn’t even have the good grace to look at him. Clint felt his fingers clench on his knees, muscles in his jaw tensing with the flash of anger that traveled straight up his spine like wild fire.  
That was another problem with his little issue, the mood swings. It took two long deep breaths for him to unclench and remember that he loved Natasha, the woman was the closest thing he had to a mother or a big sister.

“Am I missing something here?” Steve asked softly, he’s eyes back out the window, scanning the streets of Minsk as a light drizzle peppered the single pain of glass in the grimy window. His tone conveyed he knew he was.

“Nothing.” Clint grunted, worrying at his lower lip as an itch settled at the back of his neck, rolling his head on his neck to try and alleviate it.

“You’re an idiot.” Natasha finally lifted her head to pin him with her sharp gaze to go with the razor sharp words.

“What else is new?” Even as he said it the words felt flat, he couldn’t seem to summon up enough energy to make it believable.

He got an elegant eyebrow arch in response as he finally lost the battle with the itch. His nails scraped against the inked skin of his neck, along the carefully designed lines of the swooping Hawk head that hid the stamp. He could feel the unfaltering straight lines burn, feel the weighted presence of them even under the tattooed camouflage. Natasha sighed again and Clint couldn’t help the flinch, turning away to pace to the window. It was as good as showing her his belly, but as much as he hated showing weakness, even with the mood swings he trusted her.

Slipping into the small space next to Steve Clint let his eyes sweep the street out side, itching to get his bow and get up high despite the cold, wet wether. The street below was empty at this time, just a cat sheltering itself from the rain in the doorway of a shuttered café. They had good sight lines to the building across the road and down a bit, the one they believed their target to be in. As much as Clint wanted to get up high, this was Steve’s show. It was Steve’s long lost best friend they had been tracking down the last two months and Cap had put his foot down, he was adamant that he didn’t want Bucky to feel hunted even though they were on the tail of the Winter Soldier. That was something else making his skin crawl.  
Here in this room right now, they were like rats in a trap. Other than the window and a few surveillance bugs they’d planted, they were blind. Anybody could be watching them, could be waiting for the best time to hit them. His muscles tightened up of their own accord and he rescanned the street carefully, feeling the little pinch in his pupils as he focused.

The flat they’d tracked Bucky too was dark, as rundown as the motel they were in and about par for corse in this part of the city. Even so, Clint could easily see the floral pattern in the yellowing lace curtain, follow the spirals of leaves and posies that traveled up the length of lace. Past the curtain however, he couldn’t see any movement in the obscured shadowed depths of the room beyond it.  
His fingers twitched with the need to gather up his bow and he had to fight it down. It rankled, leaving themselves open like this. He ached to just grab a tranq arrow and go see if he could bag the guy.

“This isn’t your mission Little Bird.” Natasha murmured softly from her spot.

His shoulders tensed up again, wanting to demand how she could know and biting the words back down. She knew because she knew him and she knew him because he’d let himself be known. Biting her head off for his irrational mood swings just wasn’t fair, no matter how satisfying it would be. Plus she would just find a way to make him pay for it later. Steve tensed next to him for a long moment before relaxing with a deep breath, likely expecting some kind of confrontation and standing down when nothing came.

They had an understanding, he and Natasha, ever since they’d first met; long before he’d joined SHIELD and then coaxed her to join him. The didn’t ask and they didn’t tell. She never asked him about where he came from and he didn’t ask her how old she was. Other things were fair game and they trusted each other -and Phil to an extent- about as much as they could trust anybody, shared somethings with each other but it was an unspoken agreement between them.  
That isn’t to say that Clint didn’t have his assumptions, he did just as surely as Natasha had hers, they just gave each other the respect and curtesy of not trying to verify those assumptions. It wasn’t normal, may not even be healthy but it worked for them. So far their trust in each other didn’t seem to be misplaced.

He forcefully turned himself away from that line of thought before it could drift to a place he didn’t want it to go, especially not now. If he let himself while his emotions were swinging wildly, he was liable to do something supremely stupid. No, that could wait until the traitorous bastard surfaced and he could use him for target practice. Rumlow was not a name to be even spoken around Clint at the moment.

  
“You will tell me, when you need it.” Natasha stated firmly, a statement of fact.

He didn’t ask what she meant, she was observant and had her own assumptions, even if this was about as close as they got to acknowledging anything. He felt some of the tension in him dissipate and relief unfurl low in his belly. Nat would cover for him long enough to get himself sorted. They both knew he didn’t have the luxury of locking himself away, not right now, so he would have to go out and pick somebody up. He pressed his forehead to the cool glass a moment.

“I will.” He murmured, breath fogging up the window as he pulled back.

Withdrawing to the couch he’d claimed, he dropped onto it heavily, propping his booted feet on one arm rest and his head on the other. He had about a day before he’d need to slip away and take care of his little problem and right now Steve was on watch. Best thing he could do was try and get some rest.

 

>>>\------->

  
They weren’t being very stealthy but then again from what he could remember, the memories fractured, disjointed and not fully formed, Steve had never liked subterfuge. The little guy that he saw in his head every time he caught a glimpse of the large blond had always been a mouthy punk. He was the kinda guy that got in your face and tried to brake you nose, not slip up behind you and cheap shot you in the back of the skull.  
The two with him, they were more like him. The him that existed now that is. Those two were all about taking any advantage to complete their objective. He understood that better now, now that he was a person again and not the obedient, mindless drone they had conditioned him to be. Not everything was there though, things were still missing, things from before and after he fell from the train.  
That was why he had let this cat and mouse game go on so long. He wasn’t sure yet, needed more time before he made a decision, more time to figure things out.

He wasn’t the man that had fallen to an icy death following his childhood best friend, but he also wasn’t the thing that had been created when HYDRA found the sergeant that had been too stubborn to just die. As much as the man that had fallen wanted to run back to Steve as fast as his legs could carry him, the weapon was convinced enemies were everywhere.  
So, as much as they watched him, he watched them in return while he slowly pieced together the jigsaw puzzle that was his mind. It helped, gave him a task that felt familiar while getting his unsteady mind to a point where he could function as something more than what he’d been made into.

He’d never spent so long off the ice before and now he knew why, knew why they were always so quick to push him into the chair and put him back into cryo. He knew he wasn’t normal, beyond the glaringly obvious that is. He could remember the pain of something burning in his veins, something tearing him inside out and back to front, using the pieces to make him into something else. It was that hazy eternity where time had lost meaning under the onslaught of pain, until he thought he’d go mad, that he had gone mad when little Stevie appeared one night not so little anymore the first time and the second time waking to an arm of metal. He wasn’t normal anymore, he was something else.  
He wasn’t stupid, yes his memory had holes but he could still listen, had listened in fact; when handlers and techs got loose lips around him. They’d been so sure of their tech, of their control, that they hadn’t really cared what was said around him. They’d treated him like an object instead of something that lived, that drew breath and thought. So long as they kept wiping him and stuffing him back in the freezer, they had control. Only they weren’t in control any more, he hadn’t been wiped or frozen in two months and he was remembering.

He wasn’t alright, he knew that, was self aware enough to know he wasn’t, but he was self aware for the first time in along time and he refused to go back to being mindless.

He had a decision to make.

He couldn’t disappear, not now, his face was everywhere and people were slowly closing in. He would spend the rest of his life -however long that was- running, hiding and fighting. He didn’t want that, he’d spent enough time locked away in a deep, dark hole, he wanted to be able to bask in the sun on his face. He knew what he wanted to do but he wasn’t sure yet how best to get there.  
Yes he had the deep ingrained instinct to go to Steve “To the end of the line pal.” But it wasn’t just Steve he would be going to.

He knew her, the Black Widow, most of those memories were still missing but he could recall enough to be weary of going near her. Near every time they had met in the past it had ended in one of them almost dead. Odessa in 09, Moscow in 95, Düsseldorf in 91 Belfast in 81, London in 77, And Dallas in 63. That isn’t to say they were mortal enemies. He could remember a scant few times they had worked together too, times when HYDRA and the Red Room had had similar agendas but more often than not they had collided in a bloody, lethal fight.

She alone was enough to to make him wary of approaching Steve. It had been decades since he’d spent any sort of meaningful time with Steve, discounting the recent assassination attempts and fighting that marked HYDRA’s downfall. So much could have changed and while the man he had been found it hard to believe anyone could change the stubborn man Steve had been, if it was somehow possible no doubt it would be the Black Widow who could do it. There was a reason she was the best at what she did, and while assassinations were in her wheelhouse, she was first and foremost a spy. She was a master manipulator, able to read a marks subtlest cues and tailor her own to get the exact response she required. Scores of girls trained by Red Room over the decades could only dream of being half as good as Black Widow, defection not withstanding of course.

Then there was the third member of the group following him. He had no personal experience with this Hawkeye and only limited Intel from the copied S.H.I.E.L.D files HYDRA had obtained and HYDRA’s own intelligence gathering. It was expected for the S.H.I.E.L.D files on Black Widow to be thin on the ground, not many new that Natalia Romanova was the one and only Widow; many were under the mistaken assumption it was a moniker passed from master to student when the next girl was ready. Even so, the S.H.I.E.L.D files on Hawkeye were too thin and not only that but the HYDRA files were just as thin- despite the fact that Rumlow had spent quite a bit of time with him. Considering Rumlow was responsible for luring many of HYDRA’s double agents away from S.H.I.E.L.D’s clutches it was both suspicious and alarming that the information he’d brought back was sparse.  
What Bucky did know for sure about the archer was that up until he was sixteen, he didn’t officially exist. The alias Clint Barton had begun appearing a few years prior, around the same time as Hawkeye appeared, but before he’d joined S.H.I.E.L.D, Clint Barton was a fictitious ghost. It was only once the assassin had been brought into S.H.I.E.L.D that Clint Barton became a real identity. So who was he?

Speculation had run rampant unofficially through HYDRA, wondering if he was really just some carney or something else, something more than the talented circus kid his alias said he was. It was made worse for the fact that HYDRA had been looking to recruit the kid just as badly as S.H.I.E.L.D had wanted him eliminated. The irony wasn’t lost on Bucky. What notes Rumlow had added to the HYDRA files didn’t help much either. Nothing had been confirmed but there were some hints of possible enhancement here and there, though nothing was concrete, nothing had been verified or proven. All anyone knew for sure was that he simply didn’t miss. Other than that it was all open for debate. That, in Bucky’s opinion, made him dangerous.  
Hawkeye was unknown. Personnel reviews were a mixed bag to say the least, some painted him as an idiot whose only saving grace was his aim, others thought him far too smart for his own good. When it came to Hawkeye, everyone was conflicted. Even Rumlow it seemed. The double agent had been tasked with trying to feel the assassin out, to gather intelligence so it could be determined if he would be useful to HYDRA in some capacity or if he could be turned away from S.H.I.E.L.D. Rumlow hadn’t been able to determine just on what side Hawkeye would fall.  
The double agent had been sure that Hawkeye wasn’t exactly loyal to S.H.I.E.L.D, more than happy to break rules if need be but where his loyalty wasn’t to the organisation, he was fiercely loyal to people. That was the crux of the matter and possibly the only point anybody could agree to. Hawkeye was loyal to Phil Coulson and Black Widow. Rumlow had tried to use that to his advantage, according to the reports, cultivating a personal relationship in an effort to sway Hawkeye.

The indecision around Hawkeye both intrigued him and made him wary. The conflicting reports he had on Hawkeye mirrored the conflicted feelings in his chest about joining Steve, but maybe that was a good thing.

  
The lithe blond he was following ducked down an alleyway between two storefronts, waiting a few moments, Bucky followed. He had been watching his observers as much as they had been watching him and when Hawkeye had ducked out it had seemed like a perfect opportunity.  
The reports didn’t do Hawkeye justice, even with all the training and experience Bucky had stalking a target, he had been hard pressed to keep up undetected. It was entirely thrilling if he was honest with himself, pushing himself to the limits of his abilities without the threat of death -his or his targets- hanging over his head. Following Hawkeye through the twisting, seemingly aimless path he wove through the darkened streets of Minsk, Bucky was feeling more like himself than he could ever remember. He actually felt like Bucky Barnes, not just some caricature that wore the face of Bucky Barnes.

It wasn’t until he rounded a corner, having had to pick up the pace a little to keep up, stepping into a dead end that he realised just how much Hawkeye had hid of himself.

The surrounding buildings formed an enclosed space, a perfect spot for an ambush and Bucky felt a frisson of admiration war with the surge of panic building in his veins. Hands on his weapons, he took a step back, eyes flicking the area before him, scanning up the walls as he tried to discern any path the archer could have taken to elude him. A gentle whisper of fabric made Bucky’s instincts trigger and he rolled without conscious thought, coming up on to his feet and spinning, knife at the ready in a reverse grip.  
The admiration grew as he met the stormy grey eyes of the archer, even as he tried to understand just how Hawkeye had managed to land so silently behind him. Even with the serum enhancements Steve had been given, Bucky knew Steve had never managed to be that silent and his own less refined enhancements and training hadn’t brought him to Steve’s level of enhancement. If it weren’t for the more sensitive hearing he had, Bucky wouldn’t have heard anything at all. Hawkeye was just that good.

“Why are you following me?” Hawkeye demanded, stood in a loose stance.

The archer didn’t have a weapon in either hand, but Bucky knew he had at least four on him. Weapon in hand or not, Hawkeye was stood ready, weight firmly on the balls of his feet which were solidly planted, knees slightly bent and his arms loose, his whole body ready to spring into action. The irony of Hawkeye’s question want lost on him at all.

“Your following me.” Bucky pointed out, watching the assassin carefully.

Hawkeye’s fingers twitched, likely longing for a weapon in his hand but otherwise he didn’t move. The assassin was watching Bucky just as carefully as Bucky himself was watching the assassin. Likely making his own assessments and Bucky was growing more sure by the second that Hawkeye wasn’t just any assassin. Bucky had seen more than a few assassins over the decades when he had been taken out of cryo, Hawkeye was better than all of them, perhaps approaching Bucky’s own caliber.

“Not tonight I wasn’t.” The archer ground out, something like pain flashing across his face.

Bucky’s eyes narrowed. Hawkeye was still ready to act but there was a flush to his cheeks that Bucky had assumed was from scaling walls, but coupled with the tightness at the corners of his eyes could be from something else. The way he stood was also slightly off, just by a fraction or so but he appeared to be favouring his abdomen, one arm was a degree too close too, as if he was shielding his midriff and while it wasn’t blatant, it felt to Bucky as if that was the case. Bucky didn’t shift his weight, that kind of tell had been trained out of him a long time ago, he did however tilt his head. Getting into a fight might not be the best way to help him decide what he wanted to do. Not to mention that Hawkeye was on Stevies new team and if Bucky did decide he wanted to join his…friend, it could cause issues down the line.  
He’d followed Hawkeye because he needed more information before he made up his mind. Hawkeye was a variable that could help him decide weather or not he could trust in his memories of Steve and put his mistrust of Black Widow aside.

“What do you want?” Hawkeye demanded, sounding far too tired and drained.

“I want…” Bucky licked his lips, sighing against the urge to close himself off. Absently he noted the way Hawkeye’s gaze flicked down to his lips. “I want to talk.” He admitted.

He didn’t trust the archer but if his risk paid off, it could mean the rest of his life. If it didn’t, Bucky was confidant in his chances of being the last man standing.


	2. Chapter 2

When Barnes had said he wanted to talk, he hadn’t been alluding to anything else, he genuinely wanted to talk with him. Not Steve or Natasha, him. Barnes had brought him to a little hole in the wall, all-night café about a mile away from their mutual safe houses and ordered them both a coffee before lapsing into a tense silence. A silence that lasted until after their coffees had been delivered and the waitress was back behind the counter at the other end of the little place.

It was long enough for Clint to become antsy in a way he never usually was. When he got like this he sometimes wondered if his patchwork DNA was really unraveling one stitch at a time, he was so raw with it. Every one of his nerves felt over sensitised, still light at the moment he knew it would get worse, the sensations growing until they became painful and that didn’t put him in the best position for dealing with The Winter Soldier.   
There was a very real possibility that if this went wrong Clint might not walk away. With the state he as in, it was a fact he was clearly aware of as he sat across from the one and only Bucky Barnes. A Bucky Barnes that looked tired, drawn and ready to stop. There was a look in his eyes that reminded Clint of when he’d been sent after Natasha, a look that told him she was ready to listen to what he had to say.

That wasn’t to say Barnes wanted to give up, that was far from it. More he wanted to stop fighting for something he didn’t believe in. It was the same thing Clint himself had felt when faced with Phil Coulson’s offer and the bullet wound in his leg. He himself had been growing weary of killing people for money, killing them for other people’s causes but at the same time he loved what he did. Phil had given him what he needed. Doing something he loved for something, Someone he could believe in.  
SHIELD may have fallen, turned to dust around the malignancy of HYDRA within its core, but Clint still had something to fight for. Phil had given him something to aim at and with the Avengers, Clint could keep on doing what he loved for people he could trust in.

“Your Hawkeye.” Barnes finally spoke.

He voice was on the rusty side, like he wasn’t used to talking and filled with an awkward inflection. Not so much monotone but like he wasn’t on the same emotional wave length as other people. That suited Clint just fine. He’d been there himself more than once. Had found himself there again as of late with the way the world had shifted under his feet.

“I am.” He agreed, cradling his mug.

The coffee tasted like crap but it gave him something to hold. He wasn’t sure yet if he was imagining the faintest quivers in his nerves or weather they were real. What ever this sporadic illness was, it was progressing much faster since the last time, different too. At the rate it was progressing he wouldn’t have a chance to sort it out, his body seemed to be skipping the step that ramped him up to horny before the pain set in.   
It didn’t help that Barnes was watching him unblinkingly. Something Clint could easily do in return any other time but not right now, suffering through this strange illness his body threw at him.

“You work with them, with Stevie and Romanoff.” Barnes stated.

Clint had to bite his tongue. Barnes wasn’t being especially verbose and the situation was already tenuous as it was. The last thing Clint needed was to set the HYDRA assassin on him because of his mood swings.

“I do.” He agreed, short and to the point, without any of his usual attitude.

Barnes finally blinked, eyes flicking around the café in a sweep of the exits, checking his sight lines before they landed back on Clint. There was something in the Soldier’s gaze that reminded Clint of his first meeting with Natasha. A way the other man looked at him that made him feel like Barnes could see all the little jigsaw pieces that made him. Assessing and studying him as much as he was studying Barnes.   
Clint had worked with and for a lot of different people in his life, he was used to being watched as they tried to make sense of him, to label him or assess him in someway. Usually it didn’t bother him, there were very few people who saw passed the masks he showed the world. Natasha had been the first in the outside world, becoming his first ally before she would eventually become his best friend. Phil had been the second, becoming the father figure to Natasha’s mother figure, not that he would ever give that thought voice. The third had been Fury, as Clint rose through the ranks faster than any other agent in the history of SHIELD, practically skipping through the levels at such a young age, until Clint was considered Fury’s good eye to Coulson’s right hand. Fury had become a mentor -of sorts- to him. The fourth person had been Rumlow, but Clint wasn’t ready to poke that one with a barge pole just yet. That betrayal was a festering wound that made Clint want to hurt the other man, not for his duplicity in being a HYDRA double agent but for betraying the trust Clint had in the man himself.   
Barnes was the fifth person to look at him and see more than the person on the surface. It made Barnes a threat, at least until otherwise proven different.

“The Black Widow.” Barnes continued and Clint’s eyebrow rose slightly.

There was a knowledge in Barnes’ eyes that surpassed most, a weight to his tone that said he knew Natasha more than most could claim. It was practically a verbal confirmation of Clint’s own suspicions. Natasha was much older than she looked, than she said she was. If Barnes knew Natasha even half as well as Clint did, this little sit down made a whole lot more sense and it made a little of the tension pulling at his aching muscles ease.   
Not totally however. Relaxing around The Winter Soldier wasn’t just like taking the Darwin Award but surpassing it, going beyond idiotically suicidal to reach a whole new level of Epic Lemming-ism.

Barnes noted the change in him, Clint expected no less from an assassin of Barnes’s caliber and experience. It didn’t worry him.

“You want to know if she managed to get under Cap’s skin.” Clint stated without preamble.

Barnes’s already rigid posture seem to tense further, the plates of metal that made up his deadly arm shifting ever so slightly. It was a massive tell, one Barnes was shocked at himself for, given the micro expressions around his eyes. A tiny tightening that was as good as flinching to someone like Clint, someone with the senses to pick up on that kind of thing. Clint had surprised The Winter Soldier and he couldn’t help the pride he felt. He’d heard tales of HYDRA’s Fist as a child. He and his kind had been made to go toe to toe with assets like Barnes.

“It’s what she does.” Barnes said bluntly, no inflection betraying him. He took a swig of his coffee, keeping up the natural act.

“Nat is complicated.” Clint shrugged.

Mood swings aside, despite the growing pain, aches and worsening tremors, Clint would remember the spit take Barnes gave for the rest of his life. It was a genuine thing of beauty, made all the more spectacular by the pure shock and surprise on the other mans face.

“You call her Nat and she hasn’t killed you yet?” Barnes demanded, far too in control of himself to let himself choke in front of a potential enemy. His voice rasping and popping with the fluid still in his throat.

Clint was feeling better and better about this little sit down the longer it went on. Even with how shitty he felt. Still, it wouldn’t do to shake Barnes’ footing too much or give too much away.

“Cap is… He’s all about doing the right thing.” Clint admitted. “Not the good thing, the right thing.” Clint amended, watching Barnes.

The Soldier was a blank slate as he listened, locking everything down until even Clint couldn’t see a thing.

“And even when the right thing means someone gets hurt, he’ll do it but he feels it.” Clint said gently.

Clint respected Steve for that but he didn’t envy him. Clint had been made with killing in mind, if he felt for every life he took, he wouldn’t have been useful to his creators. It wasn’t that he couldn’t empathise, as Clint had learned his emotions instead of doing everything to shut them down, he had learned he could empathise with people but there was a limit. He liked people in a broad term but he wasn’t bothered seeing them die either. His ability to care about that stopped passed a select circle. No doubt some sort of animal instinct grafted into his kind to make them better killers but still make them able to work together without tearing out each other’s throats. Some kind of pack like instinct maybe.

“He’d lay down his life too.” Clint finished.

Barnes looked away from him a split second, emotion flashing across his face, Clint’s words having an impact.

“The little punk always did that, even eighty pounds soaking wet and ready to cough up a lung.” Barnes murmured gently, the emotion in his voice.

“His tendency to jump out of planes without a parachute is giving us all ulcers.” Clint couldn’t help the fond smile. “That’s why we’re a team. We watch his back and keep him from doing stupid shit that will get him killed.”

“He needs that.” Barnes agreed.

They lapsed into silence again, less tension between them. Barnes was thoughtful while Clint remained waiting, fingers wrapped tightly around the warm ceramic mug to keep the growing trembles hidden.

Clint had a theory on why Barnes had sought him out. He was the neutral party. If Barnes had had bad dealings with Natasha in the past, he wasn’t likely to trust her. It was a smart move. Even people who had known she was the Black Widow had fallen for her manipulations.

Barnes had gone totally still while he contemplated, likely on weather or not to trust anything Clint said enough to see Steve, it made the tremors Clint was feeling all the more noticeable as the quakes traveled. It was taking more and more effort to clamp down on them. He needed to wrap this up and get somewhere safe and fast.  
“Even if you don’t want to stay with Steve, he’ll make sure your safe from HYDRA.” Clint stated and began to rise, pulling Barnes from his thoughts.

Barnes seemed almost surprised for all of a millisecond before he got to his feet, making sure to keep the table between them. There was something almost like worry trying to creep across the Soldiers face.

“I’m not the same man he used to know.” Barnes admitted, the words seeming almost unconsciously slipped and making him flinch.

“Maybe not but he’d still go to the ends of the Earth and back again for you.” Clint said softly, taking a step towards the door.

  
Usually, the kind of seizures he and his ilk suffered from were considered mild. Normally with the tremors he’d been feeling he had a little time to get somewhere safe to ride it out. This one ripped through him like a Mack truck.   
He was aware of the café around him, the not quite clean linoleum under his cheek as his body seized. His body was a white hot ball of agony as his muscles contorted from rapid firing nerves giving off mixed signals but his senses remained unimpeded. The table hit the floor with a crash, proceeding the smash of mugs as one of his limbs caught it, a soft swear in Russian almost drowned out by the shouting coming from the waitress.

Something cold pressed against his shoulder, soothing some of the pain from his muscles as he was rolled onto his back. Between the flutters of his eyelids he could see Barnes leaning over him, the Soldiers face bleached white with panic, keeping Clint on his back with his metal arm and cushioning Clint’s head with his flesh hand.   
The Soldier’s eyes were licking between Clint and everything else, scanning for an attack or anything that could have set it off, but there was nothing. Just Clint’s fucked up biology once again biting him in the ass.

It felt like an eternity before the seizure began to wane, the spasms slowing until Clint lay slumped on the floor of the café, almost cradled in the Winter Soldier’s lap, utterly exhausted as he caught his breath.

“Can you move?” Barnes demanded, whipcord tense and giving the waitress a glare.

Clint managed a low groan, trying to get his limbs to cooperate. Barnes cursed softly and then Clint was being lifted, cradled against the Winter Soldiers chest like he was some kind of damsel in distress. Barnes waisted no time, gripping Clint securely and slipping from the café.

The strength was impressive, Clint wasn’t exactly light but Barnes took his weight without issue as he started to run. It should have been mortifying but Clint couldn’t drum up anything thorough the exhaustion weighing him.

  
It was late enough there weren’t many people on the street, where there was somebody, Barnes slipped passed them like a ghost. Even with Clint’s weight he didn’t seem to be too impeded as he made his way back towards their safe houses, getting them back in no time. Barnes didn’t drop him off or slow down, he used his fancy arm to break in the back door and then took the stairs up to the room Steve and Natasha were in two at a time. The noise was enough to have alerted them and when Barnes put booted foot to wood, the two Avengers were ready.

“He had a fit!” Barnes barely paused, just a split second to give them time to recognise them before he carried Clint to the bed, yanking the weapon laden bedspread hard enough to send the weapons skittering. “I don’t think he was hit.”

“Bucky!” Steve sounded as if every Christmas had come at once, stood with his shield held in a loose grip.

“Clint!”

Clint let the rest of the room melt away as Natasha climbed onto the bed beside him, kneading over him as she assessed him.Her hands were cool as they cupped his face, her eyes filled with concern.

“Sei…sei…”He tried to force the words out but his mouth wouldn’t cooperate.

“I’ve got you little bird.” She promised, brushing the hair from his face. “Rest.” She ordered firmly.

Clint let the exhaustion pull him under, trusting Natasha to keep him safe.

 

 


	3. Chapter 3

The reality of bringing Barnes back to the tower was filled with less pomp and fan fare than most would believe. The Quin-jet had been quiet, Barnes and Steve sat as far from where Natasha was playing nurse maid to Clint.

When the Archer had woken, he’d barely had chance to see if Barnes had stuck around before Natasha was getting him out of bed and practically carrying him to a waiting car. Natasha was like a force of nature when she wanted to be, Steve and Barnes had both been ordered around with no quarter given. While he’d been out Natasha had arranged transport back to New York.  
Not even an hour after he had woken they were on the jet returning, Natasha spending the entire trip feeding him a mix of tryptophan supplements and foods naturally rich with it. The spy had shot down any question Steve had tried to ask without preamble, keeping Clint in a little safe bubble.

The two Brooklyn natives had watched the whole thing with a mix of disbelief and astonishment. Seeing Natasha playing nurse maid wasn’t for the faint of heart, she expected every order followed without question. For Clint, it was exactly wha he needed. For Clint, it was proof of how much Natasha cared for him. He didn’t mind being ordered to eat whatever she gave him, not just because she was Natasha but because he trusted her. It harkened back to the days before either of them had been in SHIELD, when Clint had been fourteen and finding out the boy he’d called brother was as cutthroat as the men that had been mentoring them.  
Natasha wasn’t what one would call emotional or even compassionate. She was hard, harsh and cold, it was how she had been moulded to be and where Clint only had nine years of it, by all rights Natasha had suffered decades of it. She showed that she cared the only way she could. The way Clint saw it, at least she cared.

Besides Natasha’s nursing, the flight was otherwise uneventful. One flight to New York in the Quin-jet and the foursome had been back inside one of the most secure buildings still standing after HYDRA ripped S.H.I.E.L.D wide open. Other than a brief moment on the main floor where Barnes had been briefly introduced to the members of the teem in the building at that time, the Winter Soldier he barely been seen, often sequestered away with his childhood friend.  
Clint managed a few minutes more, assuring Natasha he would be fine before retreating to the suit Tony had set aside for him. As much as he appreciated that Natasha cared, he still liked to recover on his own. He liked the privacy to be able to be what he was without pretending. Something that happened more and more as the days after their return to the tower amounted.

The thing was, Clint wasn’t ok.

What he’d originally thought was the same illness that crept around wasn’t the same thing at all. The seizure he’d had with Barnes in the café was only the start.

Unlike some of the others in his group, he wasn’t especially prone to seizures. Not like Four-Five-Two had been, or even Two-Zero-Five. He might have one or two a year, always around the strange cycle his body went through and only if he’d been overly busy.  
It hadn’t been odd for him to run several missions back to back at SHIELD. Even being unpopular with most of the handlers and teems in the earlier days, he’d still been sought after for his skills. He could run as many as five or six missions back to back before Coulson would put his foot down and order down time and once or twice, he’d felt it once the strange illness came around and he’d have a seizure.  
But it had never been as bad as they were now.

And it wasn’t just seizures.

They’d called it resistance training. They’d been exposed to everything from pathogens to radiation, seeing what worked on them and what didn’t, training them to work through what ever side effects were caused. They’d been made to eat and drink all manner of things to see how well they’d been made, to see what would make them sick. Then they’d be fed it again until they didn’t throw up any more.  
Clint remembered the time he’d been made to eat something that had made him throw up for hours, until his stomach felt raw and he’d wanted to cry while the Colonel watched over the group. But it had only lasted a few hours before it had ended and he’d learned to force his body not to react.

This was worse. There was no stopping it. Even when he hadn’t eaten, he just threw up bile instead and Clint was scared.

He was terrified and it wasn’t stopping.

One day had turned to two, two to three until he realised they’d been back in New York ten days. Ten days of seizures and vomiting. He was tired all the time and It was getting harder to hide.

Natasha was observant. She had to be in her line of work. He could see it when she looked at him, that she knew something was wrong. He couldn’t tell her even if he wanted to. He had no idea what it could be himself and sooner or later she was going to stop buying his bullshit explanations.

He’d always wondered if the barcode he’d been born with came with an expiration date and it looked like he’d finally reached his.

 

>>>\----------->

Steve’s sense of duty won out over his relief at having his best friend back fourteen days after they’d returned to the tower. Two weeks that Clint had spent either up in the vents hiding from Natasha or holed up in his suite trying to kick whatever was infesting him, and while Steve wasn’t Natasha he would certainly notice if Clint just stopped showing up to team exorcises. Especially when the Captain was so invested in making Barnes apart of the line up.

In his self imposed exile, he’d missed the debates -see loud arguments that both parties denied classed as shouting matches- between Tony and Steve on the inclusion of Barnes to the team. Inevitably Steve had won, pulling his leader card to trump Tony’s bank roll.  
The debate seemed to be ongoing on Tony’s part given the smart assed comments he wasn’t shy about flinging out every opportunity on the Coms. It was making the training exorcise a trail in patience that Clint wasn’t used to. He wasn’t known for disciplinary on the Coms himself but between the fatigue that seemed to have become apart of his daily life and the migraine that he assumed were from the repeated seizures, Tony’s voice was starting to grate on his nerves the longer the training session ran on.

The streaks of blue from the repulsers as the suit flew about the simulated battlefield weren’t helping matters either. It was taking all his concentration to stay on mission.

“…Clint!” Natasha’s voice penetrated his pensive fog and he couldn’t help the automatic flinch he gave.

“What?” He demanded, shifting his sights to bring her into his sights.

He saw the formation he assumed she’d been asking for assistance with, taking them out with a well placed shock tip before she could repeat her request.

“Thank you.” Her voice was filled with venom as she sprang from her cover, more akin to a threat than gratitude.

Doing another sweep of the area she was in before, Clint deemed it safe enough to return to picking off stragglers, more than ready for the simulation to be over.

 

 

As a child he’d been taught not to show weakness. Showing weakness had been dangerous. Flinching in advanced Interrogation usually meant practical demonstrations until he learned not to flinch anymore just to stop the pain. Getting injured in PT would mean a trip to medical and trips to medical meant that the doctors got to run tests. Medical tests of any kind always meant pain.  
Sometimes they would brake his bones to see how they healed, other times they’d cut into him. Most of the time, they didn’t give drugs. It interfered with the test results. It was no wonder he had a deep ingrained phobia of medical and doctors alike.  
In SHIELD, he’d only stay in medical until he could physically get himself out, taking any samples they might have taken with him. Most injuries he would take care of himself. He had a designer genome and near photographic memory, he’d read enough medical textbooks over the years to treat most of the injuries he got on missions.

He didn’t have a formal education, hell he’d never even been to kindergarten, let alone collage. On paper, the only education he had was what SHIELD had given him. He had a natural affinity for math but he was smart. It was part of what he was, it was how he’d been made to be. He absorbed information like a sponge. If he cared to, he’d could hold his own with both Bruce and Tony. There was no doubt they were both geniuses and he didn’t fool himself that he was better or smarter than them, but he could hold his own.  
Even with what he knew though, he had no idea where to even start.

Running every medical test he physically could with what Tony had had installed in the towers medical floor and labs had given him a big fat zilch. His results made no sense because he wasn’t human. He had no base line for what was normal for him, so the results he had from his tests could either mean he was perfectly healthy or that he could drop dead any second.  
Days worth of research had turned up more of nothing because there was nothing to find but a few theoretical’s from archives of old journals. Theoretical’s that were nothing short of useless.  
He needed information, information he couldn’t get off the internet. Information he’d only be able to get one place.

It had been running around his head more and more, and the more he thought about it, the more it made sense. The looks Natasha gave him when she thought he couldn’t see let him know she knew something was wrong. More than that the others had noticed he was hiding something and while it shouldn’t be possible with the back doors he’d been using online, Clint was starting to think Jarvis was onto him.  
It was starting to make him feel trapped. It felt like they were watching him between that and the sickness, it felt like the walls were closing in on him. How long would it be before it all went wrong? Would he end up in a cage or a specimen jar?  
Tony might be footing the bill for the Avengers but once they found out, how long would it take for others to learn about him? All it would take is one wrong word at the wrong time and people would know, he only had to look at how Bruce was still so wary of being taken by Ross to know it would happen to him. He had to fix it before that happened.

He had to go back to Manticore.

Just the thought of going back was enough to chill him to the core but it was the only thing he could think of that might work. It had been almost twenty years since he’d escaped with the others in his group, he’d seen and done more than he could have ever dreamed of back then, but even with what he’d seen, both good and bad, Manticore still gave him nightmares. Manticore would always be his own version of hell.  
He didn’t have much of anything to go on either. The few searches he’d dared to try had come up with nothing. Even on the dark web there seemed to be no trace of Manticore, nothing that related to Transgenics being more than lab mice or crops. It was as if even the theory of humanoid Transgenics had been scrubbed from the Internet.

He was going to have to physically go and search for the information he needed and with no whispers of where a facility doing that kind of work could be, he was going to have to work backwards from the route he’d taken that had led him Barney.  
While nothing else seemed to be going his way lately, at least he knew enough to know he only had one state to search through. One state to search and a pretty damn good idea of where to start.

He’d just have to hope he’d be able to make it there without having a seizure on the road. The way his luck was going, he’d smear himself all over the road on the way there, despite shoving Tryptophan down his throat like they were skittles.

 

He added another bottle of the supplement to his pack, just to be on the safe side as he double checked his gear. He was going fairly light, he didn’t need much more than his bow and a full quiver. Just cash and a spare set of clothes. Beyond that he wasn’t planning to be taking a vacation there.  
No doubt Natasha would be pissed at him for taking off without telling her but right now he needed to.  
Checking his room one last time, he shouldered his bag, slipping his cell phone into his pocket. He might not want them to know but he wasn’t stupid in the least. If for some reason he went too long without checking in with Natasha, -getting caught by Manticore came to mind- she would be able to track him down.


	4. Chapter 4

About an hour from Gillette, Clint abandoned his bike to hike closer on foot, quiver strapped to his back and bow slung over his shoulder. He kept one hand curled loosely around the bows limb, taking comfort from its presence.

The familiarity of his surroundings was making his insides squirm and he knew he was close. The air even smelled the same. It was was how dozens of his nightmares had started, the only thing that differed from his nightmares was that in his nightmares, he was still a child.   
Being so much smaller than the doctors and officers had been what kept them from revolting more than once before the escape. That and the measures taken to keep them in line. Clint could remember getting the cattle prod from the barracks guard more than once for seemingly no reason, or just because they could. Now he was older, he was almost certain it was to keep them fearful. How ironic that it had backfired.   
That difference in size was all the more noticeable now he was walking the woods he remembered as a child. There was growth that had changed the landscape but as he walked his eyes caught on things. A bullet scar on the trunk of a pine that was likely from one of the live fire exorcises. Training exorcises had been the polite way of putting it on paper, something neat and tidy to cover up the fact that they were hunting down death row inmates.

Closer and closer he got but there was no sign of any kind of surveillance. If it wasn’t for the small signs he saw he would have mistaken the woods around him from any other in the state but he knew in his gut that this was the place. Then he broke through the trees.

The large looming building that dominated his nightmares was nothing more than a bunt out husk. Fire damage scarred the brick work, most windows shattered and those that did remain were clouded with soot. The chain link fence that had enclosed the exorcise yards still stood, but only barely. Some had fallen down, others were bowing in under the weight of the plants growing along them. The north yard where they used to run the obstacles corse had gone to seed, wild roses climbing up the equipment like trellises.

His stomach seemed to swoop with the emotions swirling through him, he couldn’t put a name to most of what he was feeling, disbelief and shock the only ones he could really identify because of everything he had ever imagined, Manticore being burned and salted had never seemed possible. Manticore was just like the Nomalies to him, a Boogey man or Baba Yaga from the stories Natasha had told him.

  
Eventually he forced his feet to move, still cradling his bow. He kept alert for any sign of life but his mind turned over the possibilities. It was more than likely that Manticore was still functioning but that it had moved. Maybe someone had located them or come to close to finding out something they shouldn’t but he didn’t believe they were just gone.   
He picked a careful path through wreckage as he made his way into the building, looking for any signs of active surveillance. There was nothing, just the remnants of the old system, bunt out cameras with cracked lenses.   
As he shoved his was through the old main door, he was hit by the smell of old ash and decay. Not just death but decomposition and his stomach sank as he wondered weather the building had burned with his classmates still inside. Did they burn the building to the ground with their creations inside to contain the cleanup? Kill off all the old stock so they could start again in a new facility. It would make sense, especially if they had come close to being exposed. Why else would they kill off what essentially amounted to billions of dollars worth of not just research and development but active deployable combat units.

Clint had to swallow back the bile that wanted to rise as he started to search the building room by room, the smells clogging his nose and threatening to trigger his usually sensitive stomach.

The rooms closest to the door held little of worth, break rooms and changing rooms for the staff, a couple of bunk rooms. The front office held a few charred remains of some paper work that identified the building as a VA hospital of all things. The rest of the rooms seemed to be examination rooms, but each new room he slipped into was a burnt out shell, equipment melted to slag, furniture piles of charged kindling. He didn’t have a complete mental map of the facility, there had been restricted areas he had never been to, at least not when he had been awake or aware. The facade was one of them, the public face of Manticore as it disguised itself as a military run specialist facility. The few conveniently intact shreds paper, sign posts and wall accoutrements all attested to that carefully crafted image.

He moved beyond the crumbling remains of the security doors, passed the remains of a security hub, a second set of heavy duty doors and into the facility that he remembered. The building was immense, easily big enough to be a specialist hospital and that was just the above ground structure.

  
He hesitated a moment on the staircase, contemplating heading up to the second floor.The first floor had been mostly class rooms, an assembly hall, the mess, and a few of the restricted areas which likely held a security post and armoury for the guards. The second and third floor had been barracks, their home -for lack of a better word- that had been the safest place they’d had inside Manticore’s walls. Safe being a relative term in this case of corse.

The halls were eerily silent as he descended instead, his footfalls silent in the ash where he could remember the echoing beat of their boots thumping as they marched.

His eyes picked out the corpse under the remains of a door, the metal buckled in the middle from the bench used as a battering ram. The corpse was in the charred remains of a guards uniform, plain black in a basic cut that visually separated them from the Units, Clint and the others had always been in urban camouflage unless on an exorcise. Little remained of the guard either, just blackened shards of intact bone and even more that had been reduced to ash, the damage uneven like everywhere else.  
It seemed that as much as someone had tried to burn Manticore to the ground, apparently around those that dwelled inside, someone or something else had tried to intervene. The walls were marked in places, scarred where the fire suppression system had fought against the flames. One system trying to destroy the facility while another tried to stop it, because the fire patterns were telling. The destruction was no accident, though great pains had likely been taken for it to appear accidental, and likely also why bodies had been left behind. Whoever had tried to raze Manticore to the ground had likely expected the fail safe to destroy everything.

He wasn’t really surprised when he came to the blast door, wedged open by a half buckled filing cabinet brought from the security station. The door marked the point where the lower facility began, it was the emergency measure to seal the more secure half of the facility in the event of a breach or, as the case happened to be, destruction of the facility.

He had to duck low under the door, almost crawling even, ash and dust clinging to his skin as he moved, several small clouds kicked into the air despite how careful he was. The hallway beyond in total darkness, save for the smallest pool of weak light that managed to creep from the stairwell.   
He slipped a glow-stick from his quiver, the snap of it activating echoing in the eerie silence. The dim green glow was more than enough for his carefully engineered sight to make use of and he carefully made his was further into the bowels of Manticore. The lower half of the facility held the areas he was most interested in, mostly medical and it likely held the gene labs as well. It was also the scariest thing about Manticore.

As bad as the instructors and officers had been, including the exorcises the would come up with in an effort to ‘train’ their creations, it was medical that still gave Clint nightmares. It was medical that filled Clint with fear when he remembered his time inside Manticore.   
As far back as he could remember, which given the carefully crafted eidetic memory in his cocktail was farther than most living beings could claim, he had memories of medical. Of being strapped to steel surgical tables and experimented on. Only it wasn’t the threat of pain that being strapped down inevitably meant that scared him. It was being trapped, being helpless and of being changed.

One of his earliest memories was one of medical. Clint had been strapped down on one of the surgical tables, cold from the metal and lack of clothing as doctors in white suits stood around him. Their faces had been obscured by full face masks, the plastic tinted and so shiny all he could see when he looked at them had been his own petrified self, like a strange mirror. In one mask he’d been able to see his face, terrified and in pain, in others it was the insides of his own body as they sliced him open. It wasn’t justness pain, or being able to see his own vivisection that had truly frightened him. It was what he’d seen when he couldn’t watch them put their hands inside him any longer, when he’d turned his head and seen what lay beyond the circling doctors.   
It was seeing something that had once been like him. It could have been an X4 or an X5, it was hard to tell beyond all the metal twisting the body. Tubes and pipes alike sunk into flesh that wept ichor and puckered around the invading foreign matter, a contraption of metal constructed like a cage that held the flesh of a chest open on hooks while more metal devices were invading the exposed organs.

It was watching it face as the thing turned to him, one eye a piece of glowing red glass that seemed to pulse while the flesh and blood eye swivelled, agonised but very much alive.

It was no wonder Clint had such a deep rooted fear of any kind of medical facility and the doctors within them.   
The very walls around him hadn’t just birthed him but had birthed his nightmares too.

 

  
He by-passed PsyOps, unable to help the small shudder as he passed the door. It wasn’t as scary to him as medical but then he’d never been inside PsyOps, still, Loki’s mind-fuckery was enough to make the thought of going inside give him the creeps. Natasha would call him soft but Clint liked to think that it proved he was more than what he’d been made to be. Being creeped out by a place where they literally brainwashed people and unmade them was just plain smart to Clint.

He ignored a few rooms all together, not because they gave him the creeps or any negative recollections, but because what he was after was information. Information he highly doubted would be inside the MRI room or such. No, what he wanted were the offices and main labs. The rooms were the doctors would amass the data they collected, so they could circle-jerk over what theory they proved or test results that proved their little monsters were exceeding expectations.

  
When he found the offices and labs he’d been looking for, he was thankful that they in the same state as the rest of the underground facility, mostly intact. Unfortunately there was no power, so he wouldn’t be able to search the computers but he could rip out the hard drives. With any luck, the doctors that had worked on them would have backed their work up on to their computers and not just on a network, in which case there would be files stored on the hard drives.

  
Still, even without power he had hit the proverbial gold mine. The offices in the section had all been in use when the facility was burned down and files had been left behind and on his sweep of the floor, he found the holy grail. An intact file room. He wouldn’t be able to take everything with him, not on the bike but as he began to sift through the rooms, gathering files that looked to be useful, it was looking good that he might find something that would help him.

 

It took hours, skimming through files, ripping apart computer towers to get at the hard drives, rummaging through filing cabinets and desk draws. The silence of the facility only broken by the rustle of papers and the occasional scurry of a rat, a silence he would never had thought Manticore was capable of. Eventually he’d amassed all the files that looked useful and the hard drives of three dozen computers, all haphazardly stuffed into a few rucksacks he’d scrounged from on of the security lockers and a crate he liberated from one of the supply rooms. There was too much to take with him with the limit of what he would be able to physically transport on a motorcycle. He whittled the files down to what looked most promising and the hard drives. He could always return if he needed the rest.

He stashed the files he couldn’t take with him, just in case someone else decided to poke around, then made a hasty exit with the information.

  
Out side, the sun was hanging high, the day already half over and promising an afternoon as warm as the morning had apparently been. Clint took a moment to breath the fresh air, savouring the clean smell of pine after so long of the musty, rank air inside the facility.

  
The fine hairs on his back prickled and he dropped the crate, body moving as he heard the distinctive pop of an Icer being fired. He didn’t move quick enough.

His left leg went numb, the cold of the hit almost painful, making him lurch as his leg gave out. He tried to roll but more shots fired, catching his right arm and side. He could only grunt, stuck under the weight of the rucksacks and caught immobile by the spreading numbness.

“Don’t over do it, we’re getting paid extra not to hurt him.” A man in a non descript black tac suit came around the corner of the building.

A Second black clad figure was perched on top of the concrete overhang above the main doors to the facility, clutching an Icer in his grip and Clint cursed, hearing someone approach from behind.

“But he’s still awake boss.” Came from the man behind him and Clint glared.

Two of his limbs felt like dead weight, just a cold sensation where he should feel his fingers and toes, giving no response to the desire to move. He knew from his SHIELD training that they’d hit him with the Icer set to full, he also knew that it would take hours for the numb feeling to dissipate. Until then, there wasn’t anything he could do but curse his complacency.

“Tranq him.” The first guy ordered, already pulling zip ties from one of the pockets on his vest.

“Don’t touch me!” Clint spat, craning his neck to pin the leader with a full glare, one that promised lethal retribution from

“On it.”

Peripherally he was aware of the guy behind him shifting before there was a soft pop of pressurised gasses. The dart hit the meat of his right ass cheek and Clint valiantly tried to struggle free. It was useless. Icers had been designed to take down the growing number of augmented humans that SHIELD had encountered before the agency imploded and on their strongest setting were good enough to take him out.   
As the drugs began to pull at his consciousness, he knew the only way he stood a chance was when the drugs wore off.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ok, so, this isn't heading the way I planned it to head. By all rights when I was planning this it was heading in a Clint/Bucky direction but then Brock poked his head up and well, shit went sideways. In a good way I think but then that's up to you guys reading this.

 

 

“Rise and shine sleepy head.”

 

His limbs were heavy, far heavier than they should be for waking up. The grumble was automatic, familiar scents teasing at his nose and making him relax back against the soft mattress. Did he have anything to do today? He wasn’t sure. Couldn’t even remember drinking last night.

The smell of fresh coffee over took everything and he couldn’t help the little mewl, fumbling one hand towards the nectar. The bed beside him dipped and Clint shifted closer, eyes still closed as his fumbling hand bumped into a hot ceramic mug.

 

“Mornin’ darlin’.”

 

Clint grumbled, taking the mug. He didn’t even bother with getting up, just rolled enough to all but stuff his face into the mug, mourning the loss as some sloshed over the side but otherwise heedless of the mess. The coffee was hot enough to make his lips tingle, just short of burning and exactly what his foggy brain needed.

The last thing he remembered was…talking to Barnes. He’d gone fore coffee with Barnes and then…

Clint stilled, eyes opening a bare slit, just enough to confirm who was with him. His stomach gave a lurch with the churning anger that boiled back up.

 

“Rumlow?” He bit out, hand spamming on the mug.

 

The almost soft look on Rumlow’s face disappeared with a wince as the man drew back, getting to his feet and putting distance between them. Clint sat up slowly, the mug still held in his hands but now Clint was ready to nail Rumlow in the face with it.  
He didn’t miss the fact that he was in some sort of bedroom. It wasn’t much more than a double bed, a side tale, a desk chair and a set of draws in a windowless room, likely underground somewhere, but it was the little touches his eyes picked up that made the world tilt strangely.

Rumlow was dressed in his civvies for a start, jeans and a t-shirt but his feet were bare. On the dresser where Clint could easily see them were half a dozen photos taken of the two of them over the years. One of the pair in a SHIELD gym after training, the oldest in fact, taken not long after they’d started sleeping with each other. Another photo was of the two of them in Patrick’s, the bar Rumlow team favoured, a bar they’d spent many nights together after a successful mission when Clint had been loaned to STRIKE team Alpha, before he’d brought Natasha in and they’d been put together on their very own STRIKE team with Coulson. There was a hoodie, Clint’s hoodie in fact, a worn purple thing that he’d left at Rumlow’s the last time he’d slept over, folded over the back of the lone chair.

 

“Just hear me out.” Rumlow pleaded softly, devoid of his usual confidence, keeping his stance none threatening. His left arm was covered in a pattern of dressings, another dressing peeking out from the neck of his t-shirt, the rise of it under the material along his chest. “It’s not what you think.” He added.

“I think you’ve kidnapped me.” Slowly, watching for any sign of imminent attack, Clint slithered to the edge of the bed, putting more space between them as he got to his feet. Rumlow winced again. “Tell me I’m wrong.” Clint dared him.

“It was the only way I could think of getting to see you, to speak to you.” Rumlow blurted, looking at him warily.

“And why the hell would you want to speak to me?” Clint couldn’t help the growl in his tone.

“I didn’t know HYDRA was HYDRA.” Rumlow admitted, sinking into the lone chair tiredly, resting his elbows against his knees and cradling his head.

  
Across the room, Clint stilled further, hardly daring to breath. Most of Clint’s anger hadn’t been at the fact Rumlow turned out to be a traitor but that he had essentially betrayed Clint himself. It wasn’t SHIELD Clint was loyal too, it was the people within, Coulson initially, then Natasha. Rumlow had joined that number, as had Fury. It was the people that Clint was loyal too and that’s what had burned at Clint’s gut. That Rumlow had turned on him.  
Still, there was no hint of a lie in Rumlow’s voice, even his scent remained the same, the same mix of leather and gun oil, just threaded with the burnt vanilla note pain had. So if Rumlow hadn’t known he was basically HYDRA’s number one Flying Monkey, why had he turned on SHIELD, on Clint.

  
“So if you didn’t buy into the company line, why did you turn on us?” Clint demanded, the _'why did you turn on me?'_ Went unasked.

“It wasn’t like that!” Rumlow denied, face pained. “It wasn’t supposed to go down like that.” He rubbed the back of his neck.

“Like what? Three turbo-charged Hellicarriers taking out half the population? You gonna tell me you had no idea they were gonna be turned on innocent people? That they were using Bucky-Goddamn-Barnes as their boogeyman?” Clint demanded harshly, disbelief colouring his tone.

“The Asset always had his face covered.” Rumlow shrugged tiredly. “All we were told about him is that he was some Russian assassin from when the KGB and Red Room tried to make their own version of Project Rebirth, that he’d been recovered from the Russians.” Rumlow explained slowly, rubbing at his eyes tiredly, looking almost a decade older. “It was supposed to be a mole hunt.”

“Really?”

He could maybe buy the Barnes explanation. Maybe if he stretched it a little bit but it wouldn’t be the strangest thing he’d ever bought but mole hunting? That was going too far.

“You expect me to believe you were hunting a mole in SHIELD?” He drawled out. Rumlow let out a dark noise, half sigh, half some sort of dark amusement.

  
“Just after Fury sent Romanov in to watch Stark, Director Pierce pulled me aside. He had evidence of something shady going on in SHIELD. Funding spent on projects that were green lit, but disappeared as soon as they were up and running, personnel posted to bases that only exist on paper, other bases and facilities that were supposedly mothballed but still receiving full funding.  
“STRIKE Alpha was pulled in by Pierce, along with Sitwell and a few others. We found information that pointed to Fury hiding assets, like he was trying to build his own private task force with SHIELD resources. It didn’t make sense, why would Fury do that when he was in charge? But then he started having issues with oversight, going around the World Security council. It looked like he was trying to push his own agenda. Even the Avengers were supposed to be part of his endgame…”

“Pierce said Fury was the bad guy and you bought it?” Clint demanded, blinking at the absurdity of it.

“Look at what he’s done Clint!” Rumlow slashed a hand through the air. “The way he chartered the Avengers initiative restricted the authority the WSC has over them, why the hell do you think no ones kicked off world war three over the fact the Avengers are based in America? The Avengers initiative is practically its own political entity. Fury slipped it into so many policies the WSC signed so that the Avengers Initiative and its members are above the law in all member countries, and the countries they aren’t a member of, those don’t really matter anyway.” Rumlow explained.

  
That bit Clint actually did know. They’d all heard about it from Tony the moment Jarvis got ahold of the Avengers Initiative’s full charter, the same charter that protected them the moment they came together with the intent of stopping Loki. By all rights, no matter how many people they’d saved that day, they’d been an unsanctioned combat force operating on US soil. Something like that went way beyond vigilantism and into the murky depths of terrorism. Yes they’d been repelling an alien force, but without the charter, they would have been in breach of hundreds of laws, both national and international. Without the charter they could have been brought up on enough charges so that even Thor would have been an old man by the time the sentences had been served.  
In the case of the Chitauri, the charter had been a boon but there was no way Fury could have truly predicted there would have been a full invasion in their lifetime. Even just preparing for it didn’t quite explain the scope of the freedoms the charter gave the Avengers. Even preparing for an invasion couldn’t fully explain the Avengers. The Avengers had been arranged as a strike force, not defending army and an over powered strike force at that. It didn’t make sense for Fury to have arranged he creation of such an over powered strike force. Even after New Mexico and the Destroyer, the WSC had been looking in a different direction to combat potential invasions and incursions but Fury had been banking on the Avengers.

  
“Insight was Fury’s idea.” Rumlow kept speaking, “When Insight was green lit, Fury was the one pushing it, convincing the council Insight was the lesser evil. It looked like he was making a play and Pierce said we had to stop him. I didn’t know Pierce wanted to take over, that wasn’t how it was supposed to go. We were supposed to be saving SHIELD.” Rumlow scrubbed a hand through his hair. “We had all this information Clint, pointing to Fury staging a coo and we were supposed to be keeping SHIELD and Insight in WSC control, it wasn’t ‘till the ‘carriers were already up that anyone thought to question Pierce. When Cap said we were working for HYDRA I figured it was something Fury had fed him to get him on side, that Fury had got to him, that he was spinning tails to keep control. Hell, HYDRA was supposed to have been wiped out in the war. I didn’t even find out about Zola until after, when everything went public.”

 

There was a scary amount of plausibility falling from Brock’s mouth. Fury’s nickname wasn’t an exaggeration in the least, when people whispered that he was a Lying-Liar-That-Lied it wasn’t a joke. SHIELD had so many secrets, so many different compartments that kept things insulated and until Pierce had been outed as HYDRA, Clint would have probably believed him enough to at least doubt Fury had Pierce brought him the information. He might consider Fury someone to be loyal too, mostly down to Phil and the mans trust in Fury but that didn’t mean that Clint trusted him. Not fully. He was far too aware of the shadows the man played with and he ha always been well aware that Fury would sacrifice Clint as easy as a pawn on a chess board if need be because that’s how Fury operated.  
Yes Pierce had turned out to be HYDRA in the end, but right up until the fad lady had sung, Pierce had played everything very carful. Even Natasha had said she’d not been sure until Pierce had tried to kill the council. It was only Steve being Steve that had upset the apple cart, Steve might have run missions for SHIELD but he’d never bought into the company line, not all the subterfuge and double dealing but it had been what Insight stood for that had sent Steve digging through SHIELD. Steve had fought to preserve freedom and Insight went against everything he had fought for in the war.

 

If Brock was to be believed, Pierce had been putting worms in his ears for years, enough to make him initially suspicious of Fury. In that kind of situation, when you weren’t sure who to trust, you had to trust what you knew and what your gut was telling you. Spy movies made it look easy but it wasn’t and not being able to trust the guy that sent you out made it that much harder. Piece turning Brock against Fury had made it easier for Brock to trust Pierce instead and even then, Clint operated on a higher natural paranoia level than most people seemed too. There was an inherent trust people placed in those in charge and mixing that trust Pierce would have had with all the suspicions he’d been throwing on Fury Clint could see how Brock would buy into it.

It had been easy in the aftermath for Clint to be angry at Brock, Clint had all the information. He’d been holed up while everything was going down, he’d emerged after the fact, three messages on his burner that had him running for the nearest computer. What would have happened if he’d been caught up in the mix, without the information he had now? He’d have been caught between two people he trusted implicitly, caught between Brock and Natasha and if they’d both told him what they’d known…  
It was easy to say in hindsight that he would have believed Natasha and Steve but at the time, if he had been on the ground with them, he would have been torn. Clint didn’t do blind faith and even his trust had limits. It was a side effect of being cooked up in a lab and then escaping into the big wide world. He went with the available information and his gut, always ready to run if someone looked to close at the stitches holding him together, existing in a state of constant paranoia.

His gut flopped with the awareness that he would have believed Pierce’s suspicions of Fury, at least to a degree. A degree enough that if the information appeared as legitimate as it would have to, to convince Brock, he would have had issues gutting SHIELD like Steve had.  
Still there were a few holes that didn’t make sense.

 

“Ok, saying I’m not completely ignoring what your saying.” Clint slowly set the mug on the side table, watching as Brock looked up in shocked hope. “How do you buy bringing in a Russian assassin?” He asked.

 

“We had no idea who to trust. Who was in on Fury’s side and Pierce said he’d found this guy in the archives. It didn’t make sense but then he brought in the Asset. The guy was on ice, cryogenically frozen. Pierce and Anders said that he’d been recovered from the Russians when they took apart a Red Room facility, there were techs and officers that all corroborated it.  
“It seemed kinda smart, a guy who was basically a living robot, controlled by code words and wiped after every mission so that he couldn’t be interrogated if he was caught, someone off the books to keep suspicion off the rest of us. It meant if Fury got onto the fact someone was digging into him, we had deniability and sensitive information the Asset recovered couldn’t be divulged because he wouldn’t remember. He never complained about it and after the first couple of times, it was normal, like he was a piece of tech or a weapon we just had to point…” Brock trailed off at the wince Clint gave, the corner of his eyes crinkling slightly in confusion.

 

Clint knew what that was like, being treated like a thing instead of a living breathing person. He knew where the mentality came from, it made it easier to do things to someone if you thought of them as less than a person.  
Really the wince was reflexive at this point. He could both sympathise and empathise with both sides of that argument but Brock’s answer highlighted a thorn that was niggling at Clint.

“Why didn’t you trust me?” Clint demanded, unable to keep the hurt from his tone.

  
While they’d never labelled things between them, the two of them had been circling each other for years and while there was an open, no strings attached vibe to it, it hadn’t stopped them from gravitating to each other. Clint had slept with other people and he knew Brock had too but even then, it wasn’t spoken about, glossed over as something that happened. At the end of the day they’d go for a beer, inevitably one of them would crash at the others place weather or not sex was involved.  
They might have not acknowledged it but they’d essentially been a couple for almost a decade. Only they didn’t use declarations of love or plan anniversaries. It had been a relationship that fit both of them and their work. Lack of labels and declarations aside, before this Brock had never lied to him and Clint had trusted Brock as much as he could trust anyone. It’s why it had stung so much when he’d learned Brock had been working for Pierce.

  
Brock rubbed at his eyes, shoulders slumping in defeat. When he lowered his hand there was a look on his face Clint had never seen there before, something akin to grim resignation. Like he was facing the end, knew it was coming but dreaded it with every fibre of his being.

“If I didn’t bring you in on the task force, there was no way you were in Fury’s pocket. If I didn’t ask, you didn’t have to tell and nothing had to change.” Brock’s eyes skittered away from Clint to land on the collection of photos. “Pierce kept asking me to get more information on you so he could decide weather or not to bring you in and I couldn’t do it.” He added quietly.

  
The air in the room felt thick, making Clint’s chest feel under pressure, like he’d been holding his breath for far too long but in a good way. It made him feel warm and fuzzy, similar to when Natasha or Phil did something that let him know they cared about him but different at the same time.

“That was a lot of what Pierce asked me to do. Find agents who weren’t loyal to Fury, bring them into the task force. I think if it hadn’t been for Insight, that’s what we’d still be doing. Look at all the information that was dumped, all the manoeuvring since SHIELD was created. HYDRA was playing a long game and I think if it wasn’t for Insight, it would have stayed that way. I think Insight was something Pierce couldn’t pass up and couldn’t let Fury control.” Brock shrugged.

It didn’t detract from his admission that he hadn’t wanted things to change but it did shed a lot of light onto how HYDRA could grow so insidiously inside SHIELD. There were so many agents that had been working under Pierce’s direction, people Clint had worked with for years, men and women that Clint had had a hard time believing could knowingly work for an organisation like HYDRA. If they didn’t know they were working for HYDRA, if they thought they’d been working for the good guys the whole time, it made a lot of sense. It also explained why it had gone so long undetected. Very few people would have needed to know the truth of the matter.

  
“You still had me kidnapped.” Clint glared, sitting heavily on the bed.

  
Clint couldn’t help the smirk at the sheer bewildered astonishment on Brock’s face, letting himself enjoy it for a moment.

“You believe me.” Brock was dumbfounded.

“I do.” Clint nodded, regarding him from the bed.

Through everything, Brock’s scent hadn’t changed with deception. Everything Brock had told him had been the truth as he believed it and even as good as they were at lying with all their training, there were somethings people just couldn’t control. Scent was one of them and since being able to discern if someone was lying by scent was a skill seemingly isolated to Clint’s kind, there had been no reason for countermeasures to be created. Brock had honestly not known he’d been working for HYDRA.

“Even if you kidnapped me.” He muttered.

Brock let out a suffering sigh, tension seeming to seep from his muscles like water off a duck back as his eyes rolled heavenward.

“Because calling an Avenger is so damn easy.” Brock shot at him. “And it’s not like I could pop by for a visit, I am a wanted terrorist after all.” He added snidely, getting some of his usual demeanour back now the tension was gone.

“Fair point.” Clint agreed reluctantly. They would be having words about how he’d been kidnapped later. For now they had more pressing concerns. “So, I believe you. What now?” He asked, tilting his head. Brock blinked.

“Honestly? I figured I’d be dead by now, I didn’t plan that far ahead.” Brock admitted almost sheepishly. “…it would have been worth it.” He murmured, something vulnerable on his face.

Clint’s heart skipped in his chest at the look in Brock’s eye. It wasn’t new, something he’d seen before but that had never been given a voice because that wasn’t how they’d been. They didn’t talk about things, not the way other well adjusted people seemed to believe everyone should. They bantered, they were sarcastic, they fought and fucked but they never talked about _feelings_. When they talked it was about work, or weapons, who they’d kill or who they’d marry, they talked about hockey and films, water cooler gossip. They didn’t talk about what they were doing together, didn’t talk about any feelings they may have had for each other. They’d saved each others lives and could trust each other to watch their backs, that had been enough for them. Had apparently, maybe, being the operative word here.

  
Clint fumbled for the mug of cooled coffee, throwing caution the the wind and swallowing the rest down. It the shot of whiskey he would have preferred but it was better than nothing, because he had an inkling that all those _feelings_ he refused to acknowledged were going to get poked at with a sharp stick. God damn he hated having to psychoanalyse himself. It wasn’t exactly an easy job, what with him being built to be a killing machine and all.  
As much as he relished having people that cared about him, admitting -even if only to himself- that he cared about someone meant he had to acknowledge that he cared about what they thought. If he cared about what they thought, it inevitably led to wondering what they’d think about him if they learned the truth about him and just how much what felt about him would change when they found out that not only had he been lying to them but that he wasn’t even a real boy. That was a cycle that usually ended up with Clint being weighed under by guilt and fear. Guilt for lying to someone that he cared about, that cared about him in return and fear of either being discovered or the changes that would happen if he told.

Then again, he mused, as the cool coffee made his stomach churn, reminding him that he hadn’t thrown up in a while and that he was probably going to imminently. If he was reaching the end of his shelf life, he wouldn’t have long to regret telling Brock the truth about himself. It might help to have someone to vent all his fear at even.  
He’d always assumed it would have been Phil he told, if he was going to tell anyone. Funny how things turned out in the end.

“You might change your mind.” Clint had to force the words passed the fear that had seized his chest, squeezing his heart almost painfully.

Now it was his turn to look away, unable to look at Brock as the words began to slip free.

“I’m not what you think I am…”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If anyone cares to note, I've watche CA:TWS about six times in a row writing the last two chapters out and I'm pretty sure that Brock's explanation is pretty plausible. I don't think he acknowledges he works for HYDRA on screen and I think I could see this happening, not just Pierce duping agents but making them believe that Fury is the bad guy.  
> Besides that, there tends to be a lot of hand waving in fics around Sitwell being a double agent when he's besties with Coulson, so if we omit one or two words Sitwell says in CA:TWS, he could totally be working under the Intel that Fury is going rogue and Pierce is trying to save SHIELD. If Bucky hadn't pulled him from the car on the freeway to make him splat under an articulated lorry, it would be head-cannon that Sitwell was working under Pierce to save SHIELD because his dead best friend had believed so strongly in SHIELD.
> 
> Also, this is the last of the finished chapters, and since I've been sick for the last week, I haven't made any headway on the next few part written ones so I don't know when I'll be updating next. Sorry.


	6. Chapter 6

After the initial fear that tried to choke out his words, it was surprisingly easy to confess. The hardest part was admitting that he’d been lying since day one, he may not have actually said he’d been lying but it was implied. After that it got a whole lot easier. Hell, maybe he had grown up and matured into a well adjusted adult. Maybe at least a little, if the term was stretched the right way.

 

“I’m not what you think I am…”

 

That was the hardest part over. An admission and a confession at the same time. The fear eased with every single word until, when he sucked in his next breath, he was filled with a giddy sort of euphoria that made his head spin. Maybe it was the relief of finally sharing something he’d had to keep to himself for so long.

 

“I mean, I’m me, the same me you know but I’m not…human.” Clint blurted out, surprising himself with how quick the worlds tumbled loose. How easy they fell from his lips after so long of keeping them sealed inside his internal monologue. “Fury doesn’t know, even Phil didn’t know.” He explained, it felt important to make that clear, that Clint hadn’t told anybody, that he hadn’t just been keeping it from Brock.

 

“That your not human?” Brock asked slowly, scepticism and disbelief lacing every syllable of every word. He drawl seeming a little more pronounced than usual as his eyebrows climbed his forehead. “You look pretty human to me.” He added, a distinct tone to his voice that Clint knew well.

 

Apparently Brock was feeling good enough to about the whole situation to get back to teasing Clint. He’d been subjected that tone enough over the years to know Brock was picturing just what he looked like, sans clothing, likely he was also thinking thoughts about what Clint felt like naked as well. Clint couldn’t help the eye-roll, just hoping the teasing stuck around after he’d finished his explanation.

 

“I’m supposed to.” Clint shrugged, pulling himself away from that tone and back on track. He was spilling his sordid history after all. “I was grown in a lab.” He hedged. Brock stilled, face turning serious.  
“Long story short, I was made in a test tube, built piece by piece by a scientist. They were making super soldiers, using gene splicing and gene therapies, all that good stuff. We were all told about it, like it was a privilege to be made like we were.” Clint shifted on the bed, drawing a knee to his chest and looping his arms around it, curling in on himself. “I’m what they call a Transgenic. If you wanna get poetic, we’re chimera. I might look human but if you put me under a microscope, I’m as patchwork as Frankenstein’s monster.”

 

That sounded so much worse aloud. It didn’t seem quite as harsh in his own head when he thought of himself as Frankenstein’s monster. Sure he hadn’t technically been made by Frankenstein but it was the same difference and who knew, maybe the guy who’d spliced him into existence was a descendant of an actual Frankenstein or something.

  
“Like the stuff they do to crops?” Brock asked, genuinely perplexed. It started a bitter laugh out of Clint.

“That’s like kindergarten finger painting in comparison.” Clint couldn’t help the dark humour. “Barnes, the Winter Soldier, we were made to go toe to toe with those like him, like Cap.” Clint rested his chin on his knee. So far Brock was taking this better than he could ever have thought possible. The disbelief and scepticism was still there but Brock seemed to be keeping a lid on it for now, maybe waiting to hear the whole tale before deciding on what to do with him.

“It was the closest thing to a fairy tale we had as kids. I think they liked to use it in Indoc as a point of pride or something. That we should be proud that we were made to outclass the famous Captain America, to stand against EnComs like the Winter Soldier and take them out. That was the reason that we were made.  
“So much money had been thrown at Erskine’s research trying to remake the God-Maker serum that made Cap, billions of dollars and it went nowhere, so Project Manticore was green lit. They wanted what they always wanted, an army of super soldiers that would surpass all other armies and since the serum research wasn’t going anywhere, they turned to genetics. Recombinant DNA, advanced genome therapies and cutting edge gene splicing. Build the army from the ground up instead of trying to make a serum to change someone that was already full grown. That’s how they made us. Snipping bits out of our DNA and filling it with something else.

“It’s like they made a list of traits they wanted and a list of traits they could loose. They wanted us to need less sleep so they threw a bit of shark in the mix, increased muscle strength without making us huge so in went some cat, better eyesight so they sprinkled in some bird. We’re not slugs, snails and puppy dogs tails, we’re shark teeth, cat claws and killer instincts, no sugar, spice and all things nice for us.” He paused with a grimace but it wasn’t like it wasn’t true. Over simplified sure but still pretty much the core of the matter.

 

There was a growing understanding on Brock’s face, something like horror mixed in that Clint didn’t want to see yet, so he didn’t look. He was dying anyway, or at least it seemed so. He’d been getting exponentially worse over the last week, surly he wouldn’t have to put up with it long when Brock moved passed horror and started to hate him, that seemed to be what humans did to things that didn’t fit their world view, at least until they were saved by the same things that they hated. It only took a look at Banners situation for Clint to see that and even after the invasion, people like Ross still wanted to lock him in a lab and do the bad kind of science on him.

 

  
“No one knows. No one but you, I guess.” Clint shrugged weakly, eyes flicking around the bare cinder block walls around him. “Maybe Nat; but I haven’t told her and she’s never asked.”

 

  
Maybe he should be more concerned with the fact he’d been abducted and was currently ignorant of where the hell he was but he’d believed Brock when he explained and without the information he’d taken from Manticore, there wasn’t a lot he could do about the situation he was more concerned about.  
As much as it was a relief he wouldn’t have to live long with whatever happened next, he didn’t want to die. Weather that was something he wanted himself or a survival instinct stitched into his patchwork DNA somewhere he wasn’t sure. His feeling remained the same, he didn’t want to die. Just because he didn’t want to die didn’t mean he wasn’t going to though, it seemed inevitable really. Why else would he suddenly be throwing up, having grand mall seizures and generally feeling like death warmed over at an increasing rate and severity.

 

 

“How did you end up at SHIELD?” Brock frowned.

 

 

“How else? A bunch of us escaped.” Clint couldn’t help the dry smirk at that. “We were nine and we decided we didn’t want to be tortured anymore, so we booked it one night. There was about a dozen of us all together, we took out the guards, broke out of the facility, jumped the perimeter fence and split. Never saw any of them again.” Clint explained.  
“I hooked up with Barney on the road, it wasn’t long after his parents died and he’d runaway from the group home practically the day they put him in there, was heading for a circus he’d seen flyers for. He was the first kid my age I’d met that wasn’t from Manticore. Shit; He thought I was a retard at first, he kept talking all this shit I had no reference for and had zero survival skills what so ever.” Clint snorted with remembered amusement. “He was as alien to me as I was to him but he gave me a name, tried to teach me what he thought a kid should know and I kept him from starving to death on the hike to the circus. When we got there he said I was his kid brother and that was it. I wasn’t Six-Nine-Two anymore, I was Clint Barton. I wasn’t a Transgenic on the run, I was a Carnie.” Clint blew out a breath.  
“Didn’t take long before Buck and Jaques noticed I was a natural. It was like they had a nose for killer instincts or something. Within the year they were lining up jobs for me. It took me a while but eventually I realised they were using me. I was nothing more than a pay-day to them, Barney was jealous that they were training me and I decided that if I was gonna do all the work I was going to get paid. I didn’t want to be treated like a weapon anymore. They didn’t have to teach me how to kill but they did teach me about the world and after the few jobs I’d done for them, it was easy to start out on my own. I was good at it. Too good. That’s how I got on SHIELD’s radar.

“I think Phil felt sorry for me. He couldn’t believe how young I was. I’m pretty sure that’s the only reason he offered me the job. It seemed like a good idea at the time so I took it.” He finished his tale.

 

  
There was a lightness he was feeling that was alien to him, like a hulk sized weight had been lifted from his shoulders. As an added bonus Brock hadn’t gone searching for a gun yet. He wasn’t making the mistake of thinking it was water under the bridge, he’d seen, done and experienced far to much to make that mistake. Even so, he felt unburdened for the first time he could remember.

 

  
“Your serious?” Brock asked faintly, a frown tugging at his brows.

 

  
“You think I’d make something like that up?” He gave a weak shrug. “Bathroom?” He demanded.

 

 

As good as it felt to unburden himself, his stomach was starting to churn. He slid off the bed when Brock stood, following the older man out of the cool room. The hallway was just as bland as the bedroom, following the same cinder block aesthetic and lacking windows. There was however, a staircase at the end of the hall that led up somewhere. It confirmed Clint’s assumption that they were in a basement of some kind. Brock led him upstairs, showing him to a bathroom on the ground floor.

 

He shut the door in Brock’s face before bolting for the toilet, barely getting the lid up before his stomach contents explosively reappeared. There wasn’t much, mostly just bile tinged a strange shade from the coffee, his stomach otherwise empty but the retching continued for what felt like an eternity. When the dry heaves finally subsided, he sagged against the cool porcelain of the toilet, laying his forehead against his arm as the chill soothed his clammy skin, fingers trembling.  
His whole system felt off kilter, likely heightened by the sudden cessation of the high doses of Tryptophan he’d been shovelling down his neck. Would he even be able to get any here? Where ever it was that Brock had chosen to hole up in. While Tryptophan was only a supplement, supplements weren’t exactly necessities in some countries. God he hoped he could get Tryptophan, he hated goats milk with a passion, not to mention the lack of good it would do when he inevitably threw it up.

 

He heard Brock approach the bathroom, hesitating outside the door for several long moments before the man finally slipped into the bathroom. With his eyes only opened a bare slit, Clint could still see he had a glass of water in one hand, a bottle of what was likely aspirin in the other. It was the genuinely apologetic look on Brock’s face that made Clint look at him properly.

 

“I told them not to hurt you.”

 

Brock crouched next to him, fearing him the glass first. Blearily, Clint took it, rinsing his mouth and spitting into the bowl before carefully sipping more to wash down the aspirin he was handed. He grimaced a moment as his stomach protested, Brock taking the glass without word. Thankfully his stomach settled and Clint slumped, exhausted.

 

“It’s not that.” Clint murmured, listing sideways willingly so that he ended slumped against the side of the bathtub instead of in danger of falling back in the toilet bowl.

 

Brock set the glass on the side of the tub next to him before flushing the toilet and sitting on the lid once he’d lowered it. Thee most have been something in Clint’s tone because there was a look on Brock’s face. A serious note with a grim edge, something he gave to grim missions, the kind of ops that usually ended up haunting him. Clint couldn’t help the small sigh that bubbled up.

 

“Somethings wrong with me.” He admitted.

 

“Wrong how?” Brock demanded, brows dipping. Clint couldn’t help the small scared noise he let out.

 

“ _I don’t know._ ” The words felt almost punched out of him, filled with all the fear he felt. The colour drained from Brock’s face, fear flickering in his eyes. “We _don’t_ get sick, we’re not supposed to get sick but I…am.”

 

His eyes burned, heart thumping harder in his chest under the weight of all the swallowed down fear bubbling up. He ground the heals of his hands into his hands as he sucked in a shuddering breath, hearing Brock move. He still tensed when an arm snaked around his shoulders but Brock tugged him in, almost crushing Clint against his chest and it worked like it always did.  
They might not do feelings but they’d seen each other at their best and worse, Brock’s heart beat against his ear wasn’t just familiar at this point, it was something Clint had missed since SHIELD had fallen. The tears were still burning at his eyes but it felt easier to breath held tightly against Brock, the bigger mans heart beat pattering slightly too fast and his scent filled with a sour milk smell Clint associated with distress.

 

Screwing his fingers into the thin t-shirt Brock had on, lint sucked in a shaky breath as he brought himself under control. Things hadn’t gone anything like he’d expected they might after his confession in the slightest but that could change, Brock was still processing and this could be the last time the older man held him. That thought made the tears start to slip free and his hand grip tighter.

 

“We’ll fix it Trouble, I swear, we’ll fix it.” Brock promised, voice filled with so much emotion Clint’s chest squeezed, his lips pressed into Clint’s hair.

 


	7. Chapter 7

Brock’s current safe house was apparently in Challapata, near lake Lago Poopo in Bolivia of all places. It was a temporary one, a burner safe house, a place to stay for a few days with a small hidden cache. Nothing fancy but since Brock expected to be dead upon Clint’s delivery, it hadn’t really mattered where they were and he’d been keeping on the move since slipping from the hospital.

It wasn’t the worst safe house Clint had ever been in by far, it had power, water and was fairly clean. Between that and the company it could have been a vacation. Could being the operative word here. It was hard to get that holiday feeling when you felt like death warmed over. Between his illness and the panicked look that had taken up permanent residence in Brock’s eyes, there was a grim feeling hovering over the whole building.  
As sick as he felt, he felt lighter than he could ever recall and that was because of Brock. Brock who was sat on the bed beside him, working at his laptop diligently, looking for the safest and fastest route back to Manticore and all the information the Merc’s had left laying behind. If it hadn’t been for Brock’s strident demand that they bring it, neither of them doubted that Clint’s bow would have been left behind at best, taken as a trophy at worst.

  
They’d sat on the bathroom floor until Clint had gone horse from talking, Brock listening diligently as he explained what had been going on, giving Clint the same laser focus he gave to his missions. Then Brock had started to plan. For him the first step was simple. They had to go back to Manticore and retrieve the information that had been left behind when Clint had been taken. Without it they didn’t stand a chance. He’d said as much before getting Clint off the floor and then tucking him into bed -under protest- with strict orders to rest.   
What was more surprising, though if he actually thought about it he would understand why it wasn’t surprising at all, once Brock had returned and started to work on getting them into the USA the quickest and most direct route possible -and the safest, Brock was adamant it had to be safe for the both of them- Clint had fallen asleep.

Now that he’d woken, he wasn’t feeling quite as deathly awful, he was watching his bedmate through slitted lids. Something had changed in Brock in the last few months since SHIELD had gone down. ‘No shit’ was the snide little thought circling his brain but it was more than that. Beyond the new scars he could see poking out from under the crisp white bandages covering the patches of still healing skin. Beyond the slight hunch to his shoulders that wasn’t just from leaning over the laptop. Beyond the not quite admissions of feelings, though the words felt like they were hovering in the air just ready to be spoken. It went deeper.

Brock had been betrayed as much as they all had been, shit worse than- because he’d been _used_. It made Clint want to wrap around him and hold him tight with the realisation. If anyone deserved to feel hurt over what had gone down in Washington, it was Brock. The man had been betrayed by a superior he had trusted, betrayed and used and then hung out to dry like a patsy. He’d been manipulated into helping Pierce try to take over the world, he’d lost not just SHIELD -which he’d had a hand in destroying- but his team, his home, his friends and his…lover. Brock had lost everything but his pulse.

Well, maybe not everything. Clint was here with him now after all.

Even so, Brock had expected to die. He’d lost everything but his life and the idiot had basically offered that up on a silver platter by having Clint kidnapped in an attempt to explain his side of things.

  
Clint could feel himself tensing, not with fear or pain but with a strange, warm full feeling in his chest and he couldn’t stop himself, he had to, it was an almost visceral need to touch, so he did. Brock almost jumped a mile when Clint’s fingers bumped against his hip, until Clint could slide his hand under the t-shirt and press his palm against warm alive skin as the older man looked down at him.   
His brown eyes were surprisingly unguarded, soft at the moment but filled with so much concern it made Clint’s chest ache. Brock had lost everything and then risked the only thing he had left to see Clint again; his life, and now, despite all that loss, right now Brock’s main concern was getting Clint to Manticore, to the information that could save Clint’s life. Jesus.

  
“How are you feeling?” Brock asked, abandoning the laptop a moment to give Clint his full attention.

  
“Well I don’t want to puke at the moment and there’s no tremors, so better than I have been.” Clint admitted, wanting to ease some of the worry he could see on Brock’s face.

“I know a guy, he can fly us to Costa Rica, I’m just waiting for confirmation from Juan about the flight to Mexico, from there we should be able to cross the boarder pretty easily.” Brock explained, shifting on his hip and leaning down on one elbow to put them on a more even level.

  
He kept just outside of Clint’s personal bubble though, despite the hand Clint still had on his back and his chest almost burned with the warm, full feeling. Clint wasn’t sure if it was because of what he was, because he was sick or because of what had happened to Brock himself, he did know he didn’t like this new bubble of space between them, not when he still had the need to wrap around the older man and let him know, if only through touch, that he wasn’t alone anymore. Clint believed him and would do whatever he could to see that Brock got some semblance of his life back before he died.

  
“What would you do? If you could do anything at all I mean, if you weren’t wanted, could go anywhere and do anything?” Clint asked.

They’d never really talked about a life devoid of SHIELD. Even after Clint had become an Avenger he had still been a part of SHIELD. Brock opened his mouth and then paused, brows dipping a moment.

“Not sure I ever really thought about it. Not really. I’m a lifer, was going to be a SEAL until it killed me, then SHIELD came along and offered me a job and I was gonna be in STRIKE ‘till I was Section One.” Brock shrugged his free shoulder, the one with most of the dressings on and eased down further, until his head was on the pillow and they were facing each other.

A Section One was pretty SHIELD speak for killed in the line of duty, Coulson had been a Section One. Clint’s gut squirmed.

“I guess now I’ll just keep moving, keep ahead of the Feds, maybe take some Merc jobs if they look clean enough.” He admitted. The squirming in Clint’s gut worsened.

“But what would you do, if you could do anything?” Clint insisted, fingers flexing just a fraction against Brock’s warm skin.

Brock rolled onto his back, covering his eyes with his arm, an almost defeated air around him as he let out a huff.

  
“You really want me to say it?” He demanded, something that wasn’t quite anger, not quite resignation colouring his tone.

  
“I asked didn’t I.” Clint couldn’t resist kicking him.

It wasn’t hard a hard kick, more a bump of toe his toe against the firm, defined calf muscle of Brock’s leg really and in comparison to what they’d done to each other in the past, was nothing. Brock let out a fair approximation of a growl, his whole body seeming to twitch almost guiltily.

  
“I’d stay with you, you fucking moron.” Brock heaved himself up again, so he wouldn’t be able to see Clint’s face and Clint couldn’t see his.

  
The tense line of Brock’s shoulders and spine did nothing to hide his discomfort at the admission and Clint might have felt guilty, might of if it hadn’t been just what he needed to hear. Even with how rotten he’d been feeling and how weak he’d been, it was nothing to fist his hand in Brock’s shirt and use it to pull him back to the mattress. The bigger man didn’t even have time to do more than grunt in shock before Clint was wrapped around him. Brock remained tense for a few heart beats before he slowly began to relax, though it didn’t stop the confusion Clint could smell seeping from his pores.

  
“Moron.” Clint muttered, nuzzling his face against Brock’s chest.

If he happened to dig his chin in a little to the undamaged, well defined muscle, it was a punishment and just how they were. He couldn’t let them get too mushy after all, they didn’t do feelings. If he happened to enjoy how that it felt, feeling Brock’s ripped pecks, well, that was between he and himself.

  
“Fuck.” Brock muttered. “You think I give a shit that you’re a…what did you call it, Transhuman?” Brock let out a soft groan that sounded like he thought Clint was being particularly stupid, even as his arm came up to curl around Clint’s shoulders.

  
Now it was Clint’s turn to tense, wanting to push away and get some space but at the same time unable to bring himself to leave the comfort and safety of Brock’s arms. Brock’s arm tightened enough to say that he didn’t want Clint to go anywhere and Clint felt the brush of lips against his temple. It made it easy for Clint to go boneless, pretend he was too weak to get away and just take the comfort that was offered. The question however, hit a title too close to something real, to something important, so he deflected.

  
“Transgenic.” He muttered, keeping his face tucked where it was, so he couldn’t look up at Brock. It might be a little on the cowardly side but he really didn’t give a shit. There were only so many risks he could take when it came to squishy feelings. “Transhumans are what they made before they made us, we called ‘em ‘Nomalies.” Clint explained, so he could avoid answering.

 

Brock gripped him firmly, rolling them until he was splayed out on his back and Brock was half laid over him, pressed chest to chest. He could have struggled, resisted and fought the move but as much as he didn’t want to answer the question, he wanted to know Brock’s answer.   
The kiss took him by surprise, softer than he was used to from Brock but no less one of Brock’s kisses. It too him a nanosecond but then he was kissing back, winding himself around the slightly larger frame, clinging to the body he knew as well as his own, one hand slipping under Brock’s t-shirt to gently map the pattern of bandages and new scars. He could feel his body start to respond in spite of the lethargy and fatigue that had been plaguing him lately and by the time Brock pulled away for air, Clint was on his way to half hard.

  
“You’re a fucking idiot sometimes.” Brock muttered, planting one hand on the mattress beside Clint’s head for leverage. His voice lacked any heat though and if it was anything it was fond, a small smile tugging at his lips. “Scuttle butt around HQ always said you’ve been revved up somehow, just ‘cuz you finally stop being a pussy and fess up doesn’t change a thing.”

  
“Well shit.” Clint blurted, stunned.

  
He’d known about the rumour of corse, it had been mentioned once or twice, overheard even more and the main reason why he’d been so diligent about not being found out by medical. He wanted to face palm a little at the atypical Rumlow answer. Jesus why did he l… Have feels for this idiot again?

  
“…And it explains a few things, you can deep-throat longer than anyone else on the planet.” Brock smirked, shifting his hips to rock against Clint’s thigh.

  
Oh yeah, there he was. That was one hundred percent, grade A, Agent Rumlow right there. Clint couldn’t help the bubble of laughter, pressing his face into Brock’s shoulder as he howled with it, giving Brock a firm swat on the backside for such a lame remark and feeling Brock’s hips jerk in response.

  
“That’s an honest compliment.” Brock pouted, genuinely pouted, sounding almost wounded that Clint was laughing.

  
Clint laughed harder, even as his hands clutched at Brock, making sure the idiot didn’t go anywhere. It was such a typical Rumlow thing that, that he was believed because of his skills sucking dick. Annoyed at being laughed at, Brock let out a huff, dropping his head to Clint shoulder hard, resting a little more of his weight onto Clint. The weight made it a little harder to breath with his laughter but it was more reassuring than anything else, he slid his hands up Brock’s back to tangle his fingers in the short dark hair.

 

Brock always made him feel better but in a different way to how Nat did and Phil had. Nat hadn’t   
been able to get him to laugh like this since SHIELD fell. He loved Nat, he still loved the memory of Phil, as much as he knew how to love anybody at least but the relationships he had with them had always been mixed in with heaps of strange familial bonds. Natasha was at times his best friend and partner, but then his sister and mother. Phil had been a mix of friend, boss, brother and father. Most of the time they took care of him, taught him, kept him from being a ‘human disaster’, however scary as that was from the Black Widow herself.   
With Brock, they were more on equal footing. Brick didn’t make him feel like a naughty child for a start. Brock seemed to knock the weight off of his shoulders without even trying. If Phil had made him safe and Natasha made him strong, Brock made him _breath_ \- Ironic when he was currently crushing the air from his chest.

  
As his laughter eased, Brock shifted his weight more onto his hand and off of Clint and when Clint looked up at him, he was smiling slightly, the panicked, wild look that had been in residence since the bathroom having eased off. There was still a shadow of it lurking in the depths of his eyes, but Clint tugged on the dark locks gently, shifting his hips. It worked like a charm, the last of the shadow chased away by a gleam of lust.

  
“Your compliments need work.” He teased, gently scraping his nails through Brock’s hair just how Brock liked and the bigger man shuddered just a little.

  
“My compliments are spectacular.” Brock assured him, shifting his weight to his knees.

  
Clint couldn’t help the almost soft sigh as a calloused thumb slipped under the edge of his jeans, rubbing along his hipbone. After so many years, they’d long been clued into what worked for each other and Brock had fast picked up on Clint’s kink for Brock’s weapons callouses, more than that, Brock knew where to use them to make Clint putty in his hands.

  
At the foot of the bed, the laptop beeped.

  
The wild look was back in a heartbeat, Brock unwinding himself from Clint with a quick kiss as he headed for his laptop and the plans he was making to get them back to the US. Watching him go, Clint couldn’t help the little frown, wanting nothing more to chase that shadow away.

 

 


End file.
